


The Barnes-Rogers Sanctuary for Wayward Dinosaurs

by follow_the_sun



Series: Team Stegosaurus vs. the Universe [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Dinosaurs, Found Family, Goat Herder Bucky Barnes, M/M, Trauma and recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-16 02:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16944948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: Sometimes the best way to solve your own problems is to help someone else. Sometimes sharing a secret is a good idea. And sometimes, you just need to pet a dinosaur.





	1. Chapter 1

“So let me get this straight,” says Bucky. “You went to an island that was about to blow up to rescue a bunch of dinosaurs, but you got double-crossed by some supposed good guys who, in a _totally unforeseen surprise_ that’s _never happened before,_ turned out to be bad guys who wanted to make money off the dinosaurs by turning them into weapons. Then you escaped from the kidnappers’ spooky mansion jail and found an eleven-year-old girl wandering around crying, so you teamed up with her to save the day. And then, after knowing her for a grand total of about three hours, ninety percent of which you spent getting chased by assorted dinosaurs that made a really good effort to eat all three of you, you decided the best thing to do was—and stay with me here, because this is the good part—to pick up the kid and take her to your half-built cabin in Buttfuck Nowhere, Colorado, where you and your girlfriend and an eleven-year-old _total stranger_ were somehow supposed to morph into a happy little nuclear family.”

“You’re making this sound real bad for me here,” Owen Grady tells him. His face is hard to read over the fuzzy Skype connection—Bucky didn’t waste any time getting onboard with the cool Wakandan wrist gadget Shuri gave him, and it’s a constant annoyance to him that the rest of the world hasn’t kept up—but he’s pretty sure that look means both _it wasn’t my fault_ and _that is a totally accurate assessment_ at the _same time._ “Look, Barnes, the kid’s got nobody except me and Claire, and neither of us is in any shape to take care of her. Claire’s already had two surgeries since the Indoraptor tore up her leg—”

“What the everloving fuck is an Indoraptor?”

“Trust me on this: you do not wanna find out. And I’m…” Grady sighs. “This isn’t exactly easy.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Bucky is, in fact, probably one of the few people who really does get that. It’s not that hard to see some similarities between Grady fucking off to build a cabin in the middle of nowhere after working for bad people and unwittingly helping to launch an epic dinosaur murderfest, and one James Buchanan Barnes fucking off to a solitary apartment in Romania after working for bad people and unwittingly almost murdering his best friend. And Grady getting dragged back to the island a couple years later is uncomfortably similar to Bucky’s run-in with Zemo, which tripped his own PTSD from “manageable, if barely” to “unmitigated mental clusterfuck.” Hell, Bucky ended up going into cryo just to get a fucking _break._ And now Grady is trying to deal with his mental shit, Claire’s medical shit, and taking in a stray kid on top of that? Okay, yeah, it’s hard not to empathize with the guy.

“Look, I don’t want her to feel like we’re abandoning her,” Grady says softly. “I took responsibility for this kid, and it’s shitty to ask her to uproot her life again. But I also know she deserves better than Claire and I can give her right now. Hell, we can’t even promise her she’s safe in Colorado. I mean, maybe three dozen animals actually escaped from that lab, but right now, it seems like half the people in the western United States are claiming that they’ve absolutely, definitely seen a real-life dinosaur in the wild.”

“Yeah, uh, about that.” Bucky glances out the window of the small house he and Steve have built in the Wakandan countryside, just a short walk from the farm where Bucky had spent most of his own recovery. Outside is a perfectly tranquil scene, one that loosens the tension in his shoulders every time he looks at it: half a dozen goats graze happily in the paddock, and roaming among them, munching slowly on a fern frond and not bothering anybody, is Patton, Bucky’s pet juvenile stegosaurus, who’s already almost the size of a battle rhinoceros and is absolutely, definitely not anywhere near done growing.

“Well,” he says slowly, “the good news is that we don’t have any dinosaurs in the _wild…”_

 

Shuri rigs up the plane with some kind of weird stealth autopilot, to avoid questions about Wakandan ships carrying international fugitives through American airspace, so once they hit Denver, Bucky doesn’t have to do much except put the plane down on the roof of the apartment building, go down the fire stairs Grady left unlocked for him, and bang on the door of apartment 404-A.

Piece of cake. He definitely doesn’t stand there thinking, _You’re an ex-brainwashed assassin who’s already barely navigating a relationship with a super-soldier who’s known you his whole life and can hold his own against you if something happens, and this is a_ child _you’re taking on responsibility for,_ _Barnes, an eleven-year-old kid, what the merciful Bast is wrong with you._

Weirdly, it’s Becca’s voice in his head this time that says _Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bucky—_ because he was never the only Barnes to swear like a sailor, the rest of them were just smart enough to only do it when Ma wasn’t listening—and he raises his hand and knocks on the door.

Grady opens it fast enough to make him suspect he’s been waiting for him and probably watching out the peephole, which means he knows Bucky’s been standing there like an asshole. Once he gets a good look at Grady, though, he realizes the guy’s not in any shape to be judgy. Civilians love to say stuff like “he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week,” but Bucky actually knows what that looks like, and he can put a much finer detail on it: Grady has probably been sleeping, sure, but only about four and a half hours a night, broken up by nightmares and occasional heart-pounding instances of being startled awake for no good fucking reason. “Hey,” he says, with relief in his eyes. And the relief is almost immediately replaced by guilt at being relieved about getting to break a promise, and there’s no point telling him that’s stupid and that none of this is his fault because his head already knows it and his gut never will. At least, that’s how Bucky reads it.

He lets himself be hugged. Maybe hugs back a little, carefully. “Hey, Owen. Hey, Claire.”

“Bucky, it’s so good to see you.” Claire starts to get up from the couch, where she’s lying with her leg propped up in some kind of plastic cast-brace thing, and Bucky waves that idea away and flops into the nearest chair before she can hurt herself.

“You don’t have to get up. I—” he begins, and then he hears it: the latch on one of the doors down the hall has just clicked, and someone is easing it open.

“I can’t wait to hear about this kid I get to show around Wakanda,” he says, and God, here comes a thing that hasn’t happened to him in fucking forever: he’s putting on the same mask he used to wear when he was hiding something from his parents, or sisters, or Steve, way back in the _old_ old days, before the war. He used to be able to drop it and bring it back up again in the space of a second if, for instance, Steve turned toward him unexpectedly when he was frowning, and what Steve needed to see—what _he_ needed Steve to see—was a carefree smile and a thick layer of charm. “So she goes by Maisie, right? And she’s eleven? Wow, that’s a great age. She’s gonna _love_ the baby goats we got right now on our farm.”

Grady deserves a lot of credit for twigging to it immediately, almost before Bucky tilts his head toward the hallway. “She’s such a cool kid,” he agrees, as if he’s the one doing Bucky a favor by letting her go. “I wish I could go with you guys. I’d love to see it myself—”

“Yeah, you’d get such a kick out of the way we train the baby rhinoceroses.” Is he laying it on too thick with the farm babies? If the last visit he remembers to his grandparents’ farm in Shelbyville, circa 1929, is any indication, there’s no such thing. “I know it’s really important for you to get Claire’s leg fixed up first,” he says, careful not to direct his voice down the hallway too clearly, or make it too obvious he’s trying to be overheard. “But it’s gonna be so boring for both of you sitting around the hospital all day. Tell you what, how about we Skype you once Maisie gets settled in, maybe take the computer out and give you a virtual tour of the farm?”

“That sounds great, Barnes,” Grady says, and then mouths, _Thank you,_ before he raises his voice to call, “Maisie, kiddo, you ready to meet our friend?”

The door snaps shut, then opens again, like that’s going to fool anyone. She’s a kid, though, and apparently the first eleven years of her life were spent dealing with adults stupid enough to play mix-and-match with dinosaur DNA, so he can’t blame her if she doesn’t expect him to be quick on the uptake. She creeps out of the room, a little girl with dark brown hair and huge brown eyes, and she says, “Hello, Mr. Barnes,” and Bucky’s breath catches, because the kid…

The kid not only has a British accent, but she looks exactly like a very young version of Peggy Carter.

 _Oh, shit,_ he thinks. _Maisie is short for Margaret, isn’t it? Oh, shit. Oh,_ shit.

Then he thinks, _Fuck that noise, Barnes. You’re the adult here, so pull it together,_ and settles the mask in place again.

“Hey, Maisie,” he says, and waves the fingers of his new left arm at her. In his admittedly limited non-combat experience, showing off the metal arm is the worst way to interact with adults and the best way to reassure children. “Um. Owen and Claire probably told you to call me Mister, but I’d like it if you’d call me Bucky, okay?”

She nods, and she comes forward, but she’s shrinking back behind Owen like she’s still not too sure about any of this, which is fair; neither is he. “So let’s get this out of the way,” he says, holding out his left hand to her. “You probably noticed I don’t have a real left arm, but I have a cool robot arm instead, right?”

She steps forward, then pauses again. He’s guessing she’s right on the edge between the ages when kids are unapologetically fascinated by the arm and when social conditioning kicks in and makes their eyes slide away from anything that hints at disability. She puts one finger on the back of his hand, tentatively, and asks, “Were you born like that, with only one arm?”

She sounds oddly hopeful when she says it, like she wants him to say yes, sure, it would be crazy to think something that bad happened because of _people._ Bucky reluctantly shakes his head. “Nope. I lost my arm when I got in a real bad accident one time. It’s okay, though, ‘cause my friend Shuri made me this one, and in some ways it’s even better. Makes it really easy to open jars, for one thing. And I can take pans out of the oven without oven mitts, so, you know, on the off chance that you like cookies, we can probably work something out there.”

It’s the first time he’s wrung a smile out of Maisie, but it’s a brief one, and Bucky checks himself before he visibly frowns. He’s always been pretty good at reading people—he wonders, sometimes, if that wasn’t a more valuable skill to Hydra than his fighting ability—and his gut says this kid is sitting on some kind of secret. Not just a little dinosaur-related trauma, either, but something bigger than that. Something like, for example, what a queer kid might’ve felt in 1930s Brooklyn: something that would make everybody look at you differently if they knew, so you had to make sure they never even suspected, because if the cat did get out of the bag, then it would all be over.

Part of him wants to say, _Hey, kid, you’re eleven, for fucksake, how bad can it really be?_ He doesn’t, though, because what he thinks about it doesn’t matter. She’ll tell him when she’s ready, or she won’t, and either way, it doesn’t really change what needs to happen right now.

As if she’s picked up on the thought, she asks him, “Are we really going to Wakanda?”

“Yeah. You ever traveled much, before?”

“A little,” says Maisie. “My grandfather used to take me to archaeological dig sites, until he got sick.”

“But he took you to, like, museums and libraries and amusement parks and all that sh—stuff, right?” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow.

“No?” she says, making it almost a question.

Right. Grady warned him about this: Maisie’s grandfather apparently raised her around technology that was way ahead of its time but with social values that dated from the 1950s or so, which, okay, Bucky himself is still playing catch-up about a lot of stuff in the modern world, but keeping a kid sequestered away like that is a terrible idea. Granted, he used to occasionally threaten to sit on Steve to get him to stay in bed, but that was because he was _sick,_ not because he might be exposed to dangerous ideas or something. (Okay, so the most dangerous ideas in a room were usually Steve’s to begin with. Okay, this is a bad metaphor.) The point is, whenever Steve had been well enough to go out and do things, then by God, Bucky was always dragging him as far afield as they could get within the constraints of the New York City transit system. And he was never going to try to shelter this kid, either, but now he sees that he’s going to have to actively catch her up on what she’s been missing.

“Tell you what,” he says, “Owen told me he was helping you pack your stuff, right? Why don’t you let me start carrying it up to… let’s just say my ride, and you can come up to the roof when you’re done saying goodbye?”

“The roof?” Maisie says, eyes widening.

“Yeah, is that…” He doesn’t finish; her expression makes it clear that yeah, that’s a problem. “You want me to park at ground level? Hey, kid, it’s okay. If you don’t like roofs, I’ll move, no big deal.”

“No, it’s all right,” Maisie says, and she’s trying so hard to be brave that it damn near breaks his heart.

He knew they took off from the Lockwood mansion without a whole lot of stuff, but it’s been over a month, and he’d expected that the kid would’ve acquired more than a couple of flower-print suitcases and a backpack with a big-eyed purple pony on it by now. But he duly takes them up and stows them in the plane’s cargo hold, and then he waits, trying not to freak out himself, until Grady brings Maisie up to the roof. The de-cloaked plane, in all its gloriously unexpected Wakandan weirdness, distracts her for a minute, but she still hugs Grady for a long time before she steels herself and walks up the ramp. Then, somewhat to Bucky’s surprise, she settles herself into the co-pilot’s seat. He makes a show of flipping switches, harmless stuff like adjusting the air conditioning but impressive if you can’t read the Wakandan labels, before he pushes the button that will calculate their homeward trajectory. “All right, kiddo,” he says, “buckle up. We got a long way to go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SHUT UP EMILY IT'S NOT A NEW WIP, IT'S AN OLD WIP THAT I DUSTED OFF, DON'T YELL AT ME.
> 
> Anyway, Jurassic World 2 was a decent movie, except for the part where they shoved three traumatized people in a car together at the very end and acted like that would turn them into a perfect little nuclear family, so Claire and Owen are both gonna get a nice rest and Maisie's gonna get the continuing storyline she deserves now, kthxbai.
> 
> P.S. Also, Snap? What Snap? I don't know what you're talking about, but gee, I sure do hope they make some more Avengers movies someday.


	2. Chapter 2

Given how long they’ve known each other, it would be strange if Steve had never come home before and caught Bucky in a weird situation. He’s not just talking about since they built the farmhouse, either, although he has to admit that the whole goat-farming shtick has dialed it up to eleven. Sure, injured livestock eating off the good china in the kitchen was new, but if he goes all the way back to their youth, in Brooklyn, when they were practically living in each other’s pockets, he can think of plenty of times when he found Bucky being used as a dressmaker’s dummy by his mother (“Jeez, Ma, just ‘cause I’m the tallest doesn’t make me a coatrack”) or drafted into one of his little sisters’ amateur theater productions (“I warned ’em if they picked Little Women, then I got to be Amy March or no deal”) or springing up from the floor of his bedroom and leaning into the doorway, one arm on either side of the frame, trying to block Steve from catching a glimpse of Arnie Roth frantically buttoning up his fly (okay, no matter how hard Bucky stuck to his coffee-spill story, Steve really has no excuse for taking seventy years to figure that one out). So when he walks through the kitchen door and finds Bucky standing over the hyper-efficient Wakandan induction cooktop and stirring a pot of macaroni, he doesn’t initially think it’s going to be one for the record books.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, dropping the shield and sweeping Bucky into a movie-hero kiss before he can open his mouth. Bucky makes some frantic “mmph” noises and struggles a little, but usually that’s just part of the fun. When their lips part, Steve is already grinning. “Are you really making macaroni and cheese? Where did you even find macaroni in Wakanda?”

“Steve,” Bucky says, “I need to tell you something and I need you to not freak out.”

“God, are you putting chopped-up hot dogs in that? I swear, you’re the most ador—” Steve stops when the words register. “Honey, what is it?” he says.

“It’s easier if you just go in the living room for a second,” Bucky says, “and then come back here and I’ll explain, okay?”

Steve trusts Bucky, which means that his mind absolutely doesn’t go to any dark places, and he positively does not spend the three seconds it take him to walk to the doorway bracing himself to find a pile of carved-up Hydra operatives whose sudden, bloody deaths he’ll be explaining to T’Challa. But when he pokes his head into the living room and sees the kid, all he can do is stare.

The little girl is poking around on a datapad, playing a game that periodically informs her that she’s _excellent!_ or _fantastic!_ in bubbly, high-pitched Xhosa. She doesn’t look up at Steve immediately, but when she does, he knows she’s known he was there the whole time. “Hi,” she says, and then looks down again, quickly, shyly.

“Uh,” Steve says, “hi.”

“I’m Maisie,” says—well, says Maisie, evidently. “Are you Steve? Bucky talks about you all the time.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you, Maisie. Just give me one second and then I’ll be right back, okay?”

He ducks back into the kitchen, takes a deep breath, and turns to Bucky, who’s standing there looking unhelpfully adorable in an apron embroidered with something he assumes is a terrible pun in the Wakandan alphabet, clutching a whisk like he intends to beat the life out of anyone who tries to take the kid from him. “Okay,” he says, “how many people are coming after you for this?”

“What? No,” Bucky says, “I didn’t take her without _permission,_ Steve.”

“So you. Took her. _With_ permission.”

“I was asked to, actually,” Bucky says, starting to look annoyed. “I don’t just go around swiping children like Baba Yaga or something.”

“So her parents know where she is, and they’re okay with this?”

“Well, no, but they’re both dead— _I didn’t do it,”_ he adds forcefully, “and the person who was supposed to be her legal guardian is… I forget if he got eaten or if he just went to dinosaur-thief jail forever, but, look, Steve…” Bucky lowers his voice to a pitch that even Steve’s super-hearing can barely register. “Hydra hurt her, too,” he says. “I don’t know exactly what they did, she doesn’t really talk about it, but I know they messed her up, and she’s _eleven,_ and if I can help her, then I kinda _gotta_ help her, don’t I?”

Steve stares at Bucky for a moment longer, then pulls him into a hug. Bucky is stiff at first, but then he leans into it, tossing the whisk onto the counter and holding onto Steve like a lifeline. “I love you,” Steve says, “so much. You and your crazy habit of taking in strays.”

Bucky sniffs. “Patton isn’t a stray. You _know_ we brought him here on purpose when we found out Nublar was gonna blow up. I still wish T’Challa would’ve let us save ’em all, I know they had to do all those environmental studies and everything before they brought in a whole pile of dinosaurs, but—”

“I meant me, you goof. But, sure, we can talk about your broken goats and your pet dinosaur too. And the stray cat I know you’re putting scraps out for, even though we talked about how its whole job around here is to eat the rats in the barn.”

“What stray cat?” Bucky says guilelessly.

“Whatever. Just, next time, could we talk about it before you bring another small living creature home?”

“You’re the one who was on a communications blackout in the middle of nowhere, Mr. Secret Bearded Clever Disguise Man,” Bucky grumbles, and then Steve knows for sure that they’re okay. “I put her in the guest room, is that okay?”

“Sure. What about school?”

“She starts at the school over in town next week. Maisie spent her whole childhood around crazy smart scientists and shit, so she’s actually not too far behind the Wakandan kids in some of the STEM stuff. The language barrier’s the big thing, but the kids her age are already learning English, and Shuri got her a datapad that’ll translate spoken Xhosa so she can follow along in class. I don’t think it’s gonna take her long to get fluent, though. She has a brain like a sponge, just soaks up everything you tell her,” Bucky says, so proud that Steve can almost forget he didn’t have anything to do with that.

“How long did you say Maisie’s been with you?” he asks.

“I didn’t say. So, let’s see, if it’s almost suppertime now, then… thirty-nine hours. Give or take.”

“And you’ve done all this already? Bucky, I wouldn’t have known where to start with a kid.”

Bucky shrugs. “I had sisters. Turns out I remember more than just how to make snacks and put hair in a French braid.”

“You helped Peggy put her hair up in pins when we went on that field mission,” Steve says, with a smile at the memory. “Tramping through the wilderness for three days, and at the end of it she infiltrated that party looking like she’d been staying at the Ritz. Hey, is it just me, or…”

“Yeah,” Bucky says softly. “I don’t know if it’s just the accent or if she really looks that much like her, but yeah. Are you gonna be okay with it?”

“If I said no, is there any chance in hell you’d send her away?”

Bucky’s face answers for him, and Steve laughs. If it’s a little forced, well, nobody has to know. “There’s your ready-to-fight look. It’s okay, Buck, I… This may take some getting used to, but we’ll deal with it together, like we always do.”

“Thanks,” Bucky says, trying and failing to hide his relief. “You can go clean up before dinner. I’ve got this handled.”

“You know,” Steve says, trying not to sound as surprised as he feels, “I think you do.”

 

“First rule of goats,” Bucky says, “is that they’re herd animals, which means they don’t like to be alone. So you gotta have at least two, but we’ve got seven right now. Steve named them after the Seven Dwarfs, because he’s a dork. You know that movie?”

“Yes.” Maisie wrinkles her nose in concentration. “Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey…”

“Bashful, Sneezy, and Doc,” Bucky supplies. “But, I mean, don’t worry too much about learning which is which. If you just yell ‘goats goats goats, come get some goat food’ they’ll come right to you. Don’t ask me how I figured that out. Go on, give it a try.”

“Goats goats goats, come get—” is as far as Maisie gets before she starts giggling, and once she starts, Happy and Dopey actually do get interested in the human making the weird noise and trot over to inspect her. As soon as one of them bops her with its little goat head, she doubles over laughing. Bucky doesn’t say anything, just stands there with the most amazing big, goofy grin on his face…

And Steve, standing on the porch of the farmhouse and watching, suddenly realizes he’s scared to death.

He knows he should be thrilled about this, for Bucky’s sake, because as far as he can tell, Bucky has always wanted kids. Hell, half the reason Steve took so long to admit to Bucky that he was attracted to men in general, and to Bucky in particular, was that he’d thought Bucky would never be satisfied _unless_ he ended up with a big, loud, boisterously happy family like the one he’d grown up in. Bucky still takes to that kind of environment easily, in spite of everything, and Steve… doesn’t. Flag-wrapped symbol of truth and justice he might be to most people, but left to his own devices, his default mode is living alone, training alone, fighting alone. Keeping everybody at a distance so he won’t lose anyone else, or worse, hurt anyone else. It’s not that he’s never thought about kids; it’s more that kids and marriage and even _home_ have turned into abstractions, _maybe_ s, _someday_ s. With Peggy it was _someday when the war is over,_ and with Bucky it’s _someday when we’re safe, when things are stable, when every week doesn’t bring us another fight._

But they’re not there yet.

“Right,” Bucky is saying to Maisie, on the other side of the yard, “let’s go over it again. First thing is…?”

“Give the goats their…” Maisie almost gets through it without breaking up. “Their goat food, and then brush off their hooves and check them for rocks. And then we sweep out the pen and put down fresh straw, and after that…”

“After that, we take them out to graze. C’mon, I’ll show you how to open the gate,” Bucky says. He shoots a wink at Steve, and then, casually, almost as an afterthought, “Goats goats goats,” and another giggle bubbles up out of the little girl, and Steve lifts the coffee cup in his hand in salute, smiling as if he has any idea what’s supposed to happen next.

 

Bucky’s plan to train Maisie on the goats first and then move her up to helping him tend what he calls “the exotic livestock” would be more worrisome if Patton the stegosaurus wasn’t the laziest creature on God’s green earth.

“No, seriously,” Bucky tells Maisie over dinner that night, and it’s only because Steve has known him for so long and so well that he can see how sharply Bucky is watching the kid for any signs of fear or panic when he throws a dinosaur name on the table. “We rigged up a speaker and played a clip of a tyrannosaurus roar right next to his head one day, and I swear, that lazy a—lazy dinosaur didn’t even _blink.”_

“Are you sure he’s lazy and not, shall we say, intellectually challenged?” Steve asks blandly.

“You take that back,” Bucky says, heated, and Steve grins; Bucky will insult his own pets six ways from Sunday, but he goes into full protective mode the second someone else tries it. (His smile fades a little when he realizes that’s essentially the same relationship Bucky had with _him_ from 1931 through 1945.) “Anyway, it’s not too hard to take care of him,” he goes on, “but there’s some stuff that’s a little weird. Like we have to give him vitamins, which I usually do by feeding him the way you feed a horse—you ever fed a horse?”

“When have _you_ ever fed a horse?”

“Shut up, Steve. What you do, Mays, is you hold your hand flat and put what you want them to eat on your palm, so they don’t bite your fingers. I won’t make you do it if you don’t want to get ancient reptile slobber on you, though. I mean, I have a metal hand, so it’s not as gross for me.” When Maisie just shrugs, he continues, “And then, it turns out being from a hundred and fifty million years ago, he doesn’t have a lot of immunities to modern skin diseases, which we get around by giving him a good scrub with dish soap and then hosing him down. He really likes it.”

“He literally doesn’t move or react in any way,” Steve says dryly.

“Yeah, and if he didn’t like it, he’d _leave,_ so that settles it. You do have to keep an eye out that he doesn’t start moving his tail, though. He moves slow enough you can get out of the way, and he wouldn’t hit you with his thagomizer on purpose—”

“His what?” Maisie asks.

“His thagomizer,” Bucky repeats. “The thing on the end of his tail, with the spikes?”

“That’s not called a thagomizer!” Maisie says. “It’s called an anterior spine cluster.”

“Maisie. Kiddo. Something as cool as a bunch of spikes on the end of a dinosaur’s tail deserves a better name than _anterior spine cluster._ Go on, say it, see if it isn’t a hundred times more awesome.”

“Thagomizer,” Maisie repeats, already giggling.

“Thagomizer,” Bucky says again.

“Thagomizer.”

“Thagomizer.”

“Thag—” Maisie cuts the word off off abruptly, and the spoon in her hand clatters into her bowl of beef stew. Steve feels Bucky tense beside him even before Maisie shoves her chair back, looking mildly frantic. “Excuse me, please,” she says, and races out of the room.

There’s a brief silence, and then Bucky says, “Go after her, Steve.”

“Me?” Steve says, startled. “She barely knows me. Why—”

“Because you’re Captain Fucking America,” Bucky says, giving him a withering look. “And right now she needs the guy who knows what to say, not the guy whose big talent is punching bad guys in the face.”

“Bucky, I—” He can’t. Steven Grant Rogers, who regularly jumps out of airplanes without a parachute, can’t make himself move. “I don’t have any idea what that was about, and she won’t tell me what—she trusts you, you should—”

“Fucksake,” Bucky mutters, standing up. “Fine, I’ll go get it out of her and you can clean up the kitchen.”

It’s Bucky’s way of letting him off the hook, giving him another chore, to keep up the pretense that they’re splitting the work equitably. Steve knows, because that’s another trick Bucky has been pulling since 1936. And he also knows Bucky won’t hold his moment of panic against him—“Because God knows you’ll do more than enough of that for both of us,” he’s muttered, probably hundreds of times, over the years. But the fact is, Bucky gave him a chance to be there for the kid, and he blew it.

When he can make himself get up, Steve puts away the leftovers and washes the dishes, and when Bucky brings Maisie back downstairs and fires up _Moana_ on the wall screen that usually caters to Bucky’s nature-show obsession, he joins them in the living room without pushing the issue. He ends up waiting until Maisie has been put to bed, and Bucky has rejoined him on the sofa, to ask, “So what was that all about, over dinner?”

“Oh, Christ, that poor kid,” Bucky says, which isn’t exactly a reassuring beginning. “Well, the good news—kind of, I guess—is that it has nothing to do with the dinosaurs. She freaked out because while she was imitating me saying a nonsense word, she realized she was losing her English accent.”

Steve manages, thank God, not to blurt out his initial reaction, which is that he’d be just as happy to have Maisie resemble Peggy Carter that much less, and nods instead. “I can see that. She’s already lost a lot of her connections to her family, and being in a new place half a world away has to be hard on her.”

“Well, that’s not exactly it. Apparently it has more to do with the fact that her grandfather used to get really pissed if she didn’t sound English enough. And Iris, who was her nanny, I guess. The way Maisie describes her, she sounds more like one of the nuns at St. Boniface who used to whack me with rulers, but I guess she was  doing her best under the circumstances. Anyway, Maisie’s grandfather apparently expected her to be just like her mother when she was a kid, and he got a little weird about it in his advanced old age.”

“Sounds like Maisie didn’t exactly have it easy even before the dinosaurs.”

“Yeah, if a semi-stable hundred-year-old ex-assassin is an improvement on her previous guardians, you know the kid’s gonna have problems.” With a sidelong glance at Steve, Bucky adds, “At least she’s talking about it, though.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, but in the end he doesn’t volunteer any more about it.

 

The next afternoon, once the goats have been tended without incident and Bucky has taken Maisie indoors to crash in front of a documentary about harp seals until the hottest part of the day is over, Steve does something he’s never done before: he goes to the palace uninvited and asks if he can get a few minutes of consultation time with T’Challa. When it turns out T’Challa is already occupied—he can hear M’Baku shouting through the closed doors of the throne room, which doesn’t mean anything _bad,_ these days, but does mean they’re going to be in there for a while—he wanders out to the garden, which is where Nakia finds him.  

“Captain Rogers,” she says, sitting down next to him. “Welcome to the palace.”

“Steve is fine,” says Steve. “Your… soon-to-be Highness.”

“Nakia is also fine,” she says, cracking a smile that lights up her whole face. Steve already thought T’Challa was a lucky man to have her, but now it occurs to him that she’s really strikingly beautiful. He wonders briefly if it would be appropriate to ask if he could do a portrait of her, maybe as a wedding gift to T’Challa… if he could ever find the time. “What brings you here today?”

“Oh,” Steve says. “Wanted to ask how the wildlife sanctuary was coming along.”

“Really? I thought it might be about White Wolf’s little girl.”

Steve is never going to get used to that nickname, but that’s not even the part that gets him; it’s the casual use of the possessive. “She’s not… his.”

“She’s in his care, and it sounds like she has no one else. Our laws have precedent for adoptions,” Nakia says, with a shrug. “If that’s something the two of you want to look into.”

“I don’t know if I get much of a say in it,” Steve says, trying to soften the words with a smile. “Bucky gets pretty attached.”

He isn’t expecting Nakia’s peal of laughter. “What?” he finally says, when she wipes genuine tears out of her eyes.

 _“He_ gets attached? You went up against the entire United Nations to save him, but Bucky Barnes is the protective one?”

Steve makes a good effort at a smile, although he suspects it comes out more like a grimace. “You have a point.”

“The future queen of Wakanda is never wrong,” she says, and unlike him, she actually achieves the right amount of levity to disguise an attack of nerves—at least, from someone who hasn’t had Natasha Romanoff give them lessons in what to watch for. There’s a reason Nakia is a spy and he isn’t. Then she says, “Is that what you’re afraid of? Getting attached to the little girl and having to give her up? I thought at first that you were jealous about sharing him, but that didn’t sound much like you.”

“Who said I was afraid of anything?” Steve says, which is a pretty good dodge, if he does say. Then he sighs. “The truth…” he begins. “The truth is, kids need you to be there for them. The thing I remember most about my mother is that, no matter how bad things got, I always knew I could count on her to be there. Bucky can do that for a kid, _be_ that for a kid. He loves the farm. I think he’d be happy if he never had to go further from our house again than coming to the palace once in a while to let Shuri show him her latest collection of internet cat videos. But that’s him, not me. I need to be out there, doing things. I need to help people, to pay back some of this gift I got in 1943. And it’s one thing to ask Bucky to accept that about me. It’s another thing to do that to a kid.”

Nakia looks at him thoughtfully for a minute. “May I tell you something about me?” she says.

“Of course.”

“There was a time, last year,” she tells him, “when I thought that T’Challa was dead. It was only a few days, and I never had time to grieve, but they tell me that people who do… sometimes, they try to bargain. With the gods, with themselves. ‘If I could have him back, I’d give him everything he wanted. I’d give up my work, I’d be a good wife, a good queen.’ I don’t think I would have gotten to that stage, even if I’d had the time.”

“You don’t strike me as the type who’s good at lying to herself,” Steve agrees. He isn’t either.

“I’m not. So, when I got T’Challa back, I never had to live up to those promises. And I’m glad I didn’t try. I don’t want to give up my work, whether I’m queen or not. But now that we’ve both reevaluated things, we’re starting to find ways to change how the work gets done. To compromise. Do you know how that feels, Steve? To compromise?” She looks him dead in the eye, and says, “It’s terrifying.”

The word startles a laugh out of him, not because it’s funny, but because it’s so completely true. “Honestly,” he says, “‘terrifying’ is kind of an understatement.”

“And it might not work,” Nakia admits. “Just because it’s working for me right now doesn’t mean I won’t want something different in ten years. Even if it works for me forever, it doesn’t mean it will ever work for you. But if there was a way, wouldn’t it be worth trying?”

“And what would this way you have in mind look like?” Steve asks, cautiously.

“I don’t have any idea.” Nakia grins at his stricken expression. “Don’t look at me. Talk to T’Challa, or Okoye, or even Shuri. I’m told that fixing broken white boys is much more in her department. All I’m telling you is not to fall into the trap of thinking you only have two options.”

Steve can’t help but smile at the ‘broken white boys’ bit. But he goes away thinking that maybe she’s onto something. Maybe he can find something worth doing that keeps him closer to home, if not necessarily _on_ the goat farm all the time. Maybe all he really has to do, if he wants to be part of this thing Bucky is doing, is find a way to be there.

And maybe there was never going to be a right time to talk about a home and a family, after all. Maybe there’s only the time they’ve got, and it’s time to let that be enough.

 

This time, when Steve comes home and hears the sound of spraying water from behind the farmhouse, his first thought is that Bucky is just giving Patton his bath. Then he rounds the corner and finds that he’s literally half right. The stegosaurus is standing there unconcernedly chewing on a fern, one side of him dry, the other wet and soapy. Two long-handled brushes are lying abandoned near his hind leg, a bucket is tipped three-quarters of the way over and in danger of spilling its cargo into the dirt, and Maisie is chasing Bucky around the yard, occasionally leaping out from behind something to ambush him with a blast from the hose.

Steve has seen Bucky in a hundred different weird situations just since they’ve been in Wakanda, but the one he hasn’t seen in far too long is Bucky being _playful._ Then Bucky sees him and skids to a stop in the dirt that’s now turning into mud from the garden hose, and for a second, just for a second, the tight feeling in his chest threatens to overwhelm him.

Then, before he can think too hard about it, he picks up the bucket and douses Bucky with soap suds.

The noise Bucky makes is absolutely glorious: half offended sputter, half startled yelp. Then Steve says calmly, “Well, Maisie? You gonna take your shot or what?”, and Maisie gives him the most evil grin he’s ever seen on a kid and turns the hose on Bucky, whose exaggerated, agonized howl might be the best thing Steve has heard in years, and, _All right,_ he thinks, _maybe there are some advantages to living the quiet life on a dinosaur farm after all._


End file.
